Correspondence: The Real Worry: What Matters Is That Government Funding of Drug Policy Studies Is So Deficient

摘要

In my view, it is not an appropriate criticism of the canna-bis policy document of Ireland's Green Party that the documents from various sources it cited as backup turned out to have been funded by the Open Society Foundations (OSF; Smyth & Barry, 2019). Nor is this occurrence an accident. "Illicit drugs" are not central to any academic discipline or profession, and therefore few university faculty are recruited to teach on the basis of expertise in the area. Academic research on illicit drugs, and particularly policy research, is thus dependent on specific funding, usually from governments, and particularly from the U.S. government, which has played a dominant role in the field. In the era since Nixon's War on Drugs, it has been difficult to find government funding for research that looks beyond the official orthodoxy on drug policies. It is hard to get funding even for evaluations of drug prohibition policies. Thus, our review of research on drug policies from a public health perspective concluded that "it is striking that so little can be said about how effective [drug law] enforcement is in accomplishing its goals" (Babor et al., 2018, p. 188). My own experience as a researcher, then in the United States, coming into drug research from alcohol in the 1970s (e.g., Room, 1977), was that there were much tighter boundaries in the drug than the alcohol field regarding what it was possible to research and what was wise to say if you wanted further funding. So, as a researcher dependent on government funding, I retreated to alcohol studies for further research support while in the United States.